Job polarizationthe rise in employment shares of high and low skill jobs at the expense of middle skill jobsoccurred in the US not just recently, but also in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that in each case polarization resulted from increased automation, and provide a theoretical explanation. In our model, firms deciding whether to employ machines or workers in a given task weigh the cost of using machines, which is increasing in the complexity (in an engineering sense) of the task, against the cost of employing workers, which is increasing in training time required by the task. Insights from artificial intelligence and robotics suggest that some tasks do not require training regardless of complexity, while in other tasks training is required and increases in complexity. In equilibrium, firms are more likely to automate a task that requires training, holding complexity constant. We assume that more-skilled workers learn faster, and thus it is middle skill workers who have a comparative advantage in tasks that are most likely to be automated when machine design costs fall. In addition to explaining job polarization, our model makes sense of observed patterns of automation and accounts for a set of novel stylized facts about occupational training requirements

This paper considers the role that high levels of income inequality and low rates of social mobility play in driving the educational attainment of youth in low-income households in the United States. We focus on the likelihood of dropping out of high school. Using educational attainment measured from four individual-level surveys, our analysis reveals that low-SES students who grow up in locations with greater levels of lower-tail income inequality and lower levels of social mobility are more likely to drop out of high school as compared to low-SES students who grow up in more equal and more mobile locations, conditional on other individual characteristics and contextual factors. We investigate a number of potential explanations for this link including residential segregation, public school financing, and differences in cognitive ability and find no empirical support for these mechanisms. We propose that the results are consistent with a class of explanations that emphasize a role for perceptions of ones own identity, position in society, or chances of success. In the end, our empirical results indicate that high levels of income inequality and low levels of mobility hinder economic advancement for disadvantaged youth.

The article is devoted to the time and space variations of Russian inner migration processes. The author attempted to trace the changes in migration patterns of two regions – Ryazan oblast and Krasnoyarsk krai, which is covering almost the whole territory of the former Yenisei governorate, basing on the analysis of census data. The development of the Yenisei governorate was a part of the Siberia colonization process and the region took an active part in the “Western drift”. The natives of the Ryazan oblast always had a great influence on the formation of the Moscow population. The named migration processes played one of the most important roles in the history of the country.

Aims. To determining the effect of asthma, cystic fibrosis (CF), and both on healthcare utilization, absences from school, and rate of progress in school. Background. Previous studies on academic progression and health care utilization in children with the respiratory diseases of asthma and CF have been limited or conflicting. Design. Non experimental, cross-sectional, secondary data analysis using a multilevel probability sample. Methods. The response of all persons under 18 years of age in the U.S. 1997-2012 National Health Interview Survey to interviewer questions on demographic, educational, and health care utilization items were analyzed. The mean and 95% confidence intervals for these variables were compared for children with asthma, CF, and controls. Results/Findings. Children with asthma, CF, or both had a higher utilization of all major types of healthcare services than children with neither of these conditions. Children with asthma or CF were more likely to have not only poor health, but more rapid declines in recent health with the greatest decline in those with both conditions. The number of missed school days was also higher, and highest in children with both CF and asthma. Despite the many missed school days, children with asthma paradoxically had a greater rate of progression in school than those without asthma. Those with CF or CF with asthma had a slower rate. Conclusion. Asthma in CF has a negative impact on attendance and progress in school largely opposite that of asthma alone.

This work examines the effect of cultural differences on self-employment. All the individuals considered in the analysis are second-generation immigrants who were born and live under the same laws and institutions in the US. Following an epidemiological approach, the variation in self-employment rates by ancestors national origin can be considered as supporting evidence of the effect of culture on self-employment. Our results show that culture has quantitatively significant effects on self-employment. This finding is robust to alternative specifications and to the introduction of several controls. Additional analysis shows that there are differences in the impact of culture on self-employment by gender, in that men are more sensitive than women to culture; and by economic activity, in that those individuals involved in professional, scientific, and technical activities, and those in accommodation and food service activities, are more affected by the impact of cultural differences. We also examine the transmission of culture, observing an important role of the inter-generational transfer of culture, although the impact of culture on self-employment diminishes from generation to generation.

This thesis explores the qualities and challenges of four Latino leaders from four different Latino nonprofit organizations in North Carolina. Latino nonprofit organizations, which are defined in this thesis as organizations that specifically serve the Latino population, are considered to be the backbones of Latino communities in the United States. These Latino nonprofit organizations work extensively to bridge the policy, social, educational, and cultural gaps often encountered by many Latino communities. Recent studies show that the Latino population growth will continue into the next few decades accompanied by an absence of experienced Latino leaders to help support this burgeoning population. A qualitative research study was conducted with Latino leaders from four different Latino nonprofits in North Carolina to further explore and understand the challenges Latinos face as leaders and the qualities needed by effective Latino leaders.

In this article, we develop a gender-specific crosswalk based on dual-coded Current Population Survey data to bridge the change in the census occupational coding system that occurred in 2000 and use it to provide the first analysis of the trends in occupational segregation by sex for the 1970-2009 period based on a consistent set of occupational codes and data sources. We show that our gender-specific crosswalk more accurately captures the trends in occupational segregation that are masked using the aggregate crosswalk (based on combined male and female employment) provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Using the 2000 occupational codes, we find that segregation by sex declined substantially over the period but at a diminished pace over the decades, falling by only 1.1 percentage points (on a decadal basis) in the 2000s. A primary mechanism by which segregation was reduced was through the entry of new cohorts of women, presumably better prepared than their predecessors and/or encountering less labor market discrimination; during the 1970s and 1980s, however, occupational segregation also decreased within cohorts. Reductions in segregation were correlated with education, with the largest decrease among college graduates and very little change in segregation among high school dropouts.

We develop a dynamic lifecycle model to study the increases in college completion and average IQ of college students in cohorts born from 1900 to 1972. The model is disciplined in part by constructing a historical time series on real college costs from printed government documents covering this time period. The main result is that the model captures nearly all of the increase in attainment from 1900 to 1950, and half is accounted for by a decrease in college costs during this period. The rise in average college student IQ cannot be accounted for without a decrease in the variance of ability signals, which we attribute to the rise in standardized testing.

Between 1988 and 2011, the amount of the U.S. population that receives assistance from the federal government grew by 62 percent. That means that more than 41 percent of the U.S. population is enrolled in at least one federal assistance program. To make matters worse, per capita expenditures on recipients are rising as well. In 2010, over 70 percent of all federal spending went to dependence- creating programs. That growth is unsustainable, as baby boomers are now retiring every day and their entitlements cost more each year. The publicly held federal debt will exceed 100 percent of GDP in 2024. Such a high level of debt always hurts an economy—and the people who live in it. The time for Congress to reform dependence-creating government programs is now.

Although most theoretical models of household decisionmaking assume perfect information, empirical studies suggest that information asymmetries can have large impacts on resource allocation. In this study, I demonstrate the importance of these asymmetries in transnational households, where physical distance between family members can make information barriers especially acute. I implement an experiment among migrants in Washington, DC and their families in El Salvador that examines how information asymmetries can have strategic and inadvertent impacts on remittance decisions. Migrants make an incentivized decision over how much of a cash windfall to remit and recipients decide how to spend a remittance. Migrants strategically send home less when their choice is not revealed to recipients but only when recipients can punish migrants for deviation from remittance agreements. Recipients make spending choices closer to migrants preferences when those preferences are revealed, suggesting that recipients choices are inadvertently affected by imperfect information.

This paper assembles new evidence on some of the longerterm benefits of U.S. family planning policies, defined in this paper as those increasing legal or financial access to modern contraceptives. The analysis leverages two large policy changes that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s: first, the interaction of the birth control pills introduction with Comstockera restrictions on the sale of contraceptives and the repeal of these laws after Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965; and second, the expansion of federal funding for local family planning programs from 1964 to 1973. Building on previous research that demonstrates both policies effects on fertility rates, I find that individuals access to contraceptives influenced their childrens college completion, labor force participation, wages, and family incomes decades later.

The inverse association between individuals own education and adverse health outcomes is well established, but the influence of other people's education particularly those with close social ties or who are family members and adult health outcomes is not. The material and non-material resources available to individuals via their own education likely are shared within a marriage to become resources at the household or family-level. Research on spousal education and adult health outcomes is sparse especially in the United States. Therefore, this dissertation examines how husbands and wives education combine within marriage to influence each other's self-rated health and annual risk of death in the United States. The analyses utilize two nationally representative data sources: the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File (NHIS-LMF).

Smoking has significantly impacted American mortality and remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality. No previous study has systematically examined the contribution of smoking-attributable deaths to mortality trends among blacks or to black-white mortality differences at older ages over time in the United States. In this article, we employ multiple methods and data sources to provide a comprehensive assessment of this contribution. We find that smoking has contributed to the black-white gap in life expectancy at age 50 for males, accounting for 20 % to 48 % of the gap between 1980 and 2005, but not for females. The fraction of deaths attributable to smoking at ages above 50 is greater for black males than for white males; and among men, current smoking status explains about 20 % of the black excess relative risk in all-cause mortality at ages above 50 without adjustment for socioeconomic characteristics. These findings advance our understanding of the contribution of smoking to contemporary mortality trends and differences and reinforce the need for interventions that better address the needs of all groups.

Revolutions in communications technology, transportation of people and goods, and the reorganization of economic production between the local and global scales have resulted in the spatial re-arrangement of daily human activities in the United States and other parts of the world. Traditionally rural, primary economic activities have waned as local sources of employment and wages due to both low-cost global competition and increasing productivity of capital versus labor. At the same time, the U.S. has shifted to being a service economy with many firms choosing the benefits of locating in, or close to urban agglomerations. Rising household incomes since World War II gave a growing number of people the ability to afford transportation between bucolic, rural residential and recreational locations and their workplaces in large cities or suburbs. Researchers have noted that areas rich in natural amenities, areas of pleasant climates and scenic beauty, have drawn people and jobs into their environs via inter- and intra-regional migration decisions. The result has been the obliteration of clear distinction between urban and rural spaces. Rural landscapes and small towns are now homes to long-distance commuters, recreational entrepreneurs and artisans, retirees, sprawling manufacturing branch plants, back-office service jobs, and tech companies in addition to (or in place of) the farmer, the mining operation, and the lumberjack. Many new terms have been invented to put a name to this emergent face on the landscape, but few have addressed the new arrangement of human activities in addition to the evolving processes and flows that cross the urban-rural continuum. The evaluation of urban and rural changes is important because the spatial organization of human activities impact ecosystems, social relationships, economic dynamism, as well as planning and policymaking. The conceptual toolkits of researchers engaging in spatial science, including geographers, need to be improved beyond the binary approach to spaces being either urban or rural. Many scholars recognize that an urban-rural binary is no longer accurate, yet continue to operationalize dichotomous urban/rural definitions in research frameworks and data analysis. This dissertation explores the concept of urban- rural spaces as multifunctional, dynamic spaces displaying a hybrid of urban and rural characteristics. Prominent conceptual themes addressed include rural economic restructuring, urban deconcentration, amenity-led growth, and ideas of spatial organization (human landscape and infrastructural patterns). These topics are addressed in an urban-rural space context by utilizing spatial-temporal data to construct trajectories of change in historical GIS frameworks. The work contained in this dissertation is meant to be an interdisciplinary product, working at the interface of geography, rural development and economics, GIScience, and land science. I find that urban-rural space is a strong conceptual tool, and that the utilization of readily available historical data in the construction of spatial databases enhances the representation and evaluation of urban-rural dynamics.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first race-based immigration restriction in American history. It prohibitedthe entry of Chinese laborers and legitimated a host of new discriminatory policies and practices that circumscribedthe activities of Chinese Americans residing in the country. This paper explores the geographic responses of ChineseAmericans to the harsh new reality ushered in by the law. Using data from the IPUMS and ICPSR digitized censusfiles, hand-coded entries from published census volumes, and Exclusion-era Chinese case files, this paper describesand analyzes for the first time the forces that shaped the geographic redistribution of the Chinese Americanpopulation in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.I reject the standard view that Chinese Americans were confined to Chinatowns during Exclusion and documentinstead their wide geographic dispersion. Chinatowns in the West shrank. This was true of those in big cities likeSan Francisco, Portland, and Oakland but also of those in smaller places such as Stockton, Sacramento, and Butte.Many Chinese returned home. Others left for cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and South. While new Chinatownsoutside the West were established, I show that much of the migratory flow out of the West was directed towardsmaller cities without Chinatowns.I model Chinese American locational choices in terms of three motivations: a desire to live in their own ethniccommunities, the need for remunerative employment, and the contrasting preferences of solitary male sojourners andco-habiting families raising children. Multivariate regression analysis suggests that the community motive played astrong positive role throughout the Exclusion Era, with larger Chinatowns especially attractive, but, during the periodof Chinese population decline, its influence on geographic distribution was outweighed by the employment motive.Discrimination coupled with good access to capital and labor led the Chinese to embrace laundry and restaurantservice. Chinese Americans dispersed throughout the country in an effort to locate near potential customers, oftenbecoming the only person of their race living in their community. Success on Gold Mountain came at the price of anunparalleled degree of social isolation. Beginning in the 1920s, the recovery of the Chinese American populationimproved the economic viability of Chinatowns and offset the centrifugal effect of laundry and restaurant employment.

We exploit cross-city variation in manufacturing decline and housing market changes during the 2000s, and jointly estimate their e¤ects on non-employment. Both forces strongly a¤ected non-employment between 2000 and 2007, with the increase from manufacturing decline almost exactly o¤set by reductions attributable to housing. We show that this o¤setting occurred both in the aggregate and at the individual level. Moreover, we show that the housing bust undid the e¤ects of the preceding housing boom, such that over the entire 2000s housing explains little of the aggregate non-employment increase, while manufacturing explains roughly 40 percent.

Since 2009, the US government has deported a record high of 1.06 million people, nearly 400,000 each year. 1 This represents more than twice the 189,000 who were deported in 2001.2 Now at an all-time high, deportation and removal is one of the primary features of immigration enforcement efforts at the start of the twenty-first century.